Major
Psychology
Faculty Advisor
Lesley Shawler, PhD., BCBA
Abstract
Children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) commonly display a range of deficits from communication skills to play skills. When the ability to generalize is improved, a greater number of stimuli can be learned without having to be directly taught, which can be done through matrix training. Matrix training provides a framework for actively teaching a singular exemplar of a target, and, through recombination, many more stimuli can be learned. Participant is a 4-year-old boy diagnosed with ASD who was taught noun-verb combinations through tactile movement of figurines. All targets are tested before and after the single stimulus of each is trained, and with the improvement in correct responses on untrained targets, a degree of recombinative generalization was shown. This suggests matrix training stimulus arrangements can facilitate the acquisition of novel targets by teaching young children with ASD to recombine language components appropriately.